Thursday, 29 June 2017

[REVIEW] Legends of Krshal

Towers of Krshal easily remains one of my favourite old school
supplements. I could cite its use of random tables to create multiple possible
ideas of a fantastic city; its powerful and fantastic imagery shamelessly
stealing from Lankhmar, the Victorian period, and various macabre sources; its density
of content contrasted with its cavalier attitude towards production values, and
so on. It is a compelling and original piece of writing, and I
think it is great. Legends of Krshal
is an expansion on Towers; more accurately, it takes the 50-entry rumours
table of the original, and expands each entry with more in-depth random
results, some kind of explanation, or a discussion of what the rumour may mean
and/or lead to.

This approach makes Legends of Krshal a subtly different
product from Towers. The tables in Towers gave you a probabilistic view of the
city – at one time, they might tell you that prisoners are being eaten in the Centaur District prison and a faceless woman walks on Lame Dog Street each
full moon; and at another, they might draw your attention to the idea that multiple crime lords were killed with black
magic six years ago, and a strange
multi-handed clock was recently installed in the Temple of the Seven Stars.
The potential was there for all (or
most) of these things to be true, or at least relevant, but it was the connections drawn through random
generation that would lead to interesting juxtapositions and combinations.
Towers is an excellent “dream machine” to generate scenario outlines in a
specific style, or introduce random elements into an ongoing adventure. It is
all there, but sometimes your adventure is about the Centaur District prison,
and sometimes it is about the memory of dead crime lords – you needn’t concern
yourself with all the other stuff.

Legends of Krshal follows a different path. It gives the rumours
table an additional level of detail, where most entries have their own random
tables leading to further ideas, connections and tidbits of information, and
some have bullet points giving you a complex picture. Sometimes, it is a
collection of alternative explanations, or a collection of loose ideas
associated with the basic concept. These ideas do not coexist as easily as the
ones in Towers; usually, one possibility excludes the other. This gives you
less material to play with than you could expect – even if many of the sub-entries
are actually reusable.

One of my worries about this sequel
was the dilution of Krshal’s original imaginative power. Indeed, some of the
entries lose their poetic power when the author tries to expand them into more
detailed adventure hooks. In the original table, one of my favourite entries
was “Everyone on Boggy Square saw a man
falling from the window of the Bat’s Tower but no corpse was found”. This
could be worthy of Kafka, Borges or Calvino, so it is sad to see the author
fumble around with ideas like “the story
is a hoax concocted by muggers” or “tragic
love – nothing extraordinary”. Do we really need that stuff?

On the other hand, sometimes the
magic works, and we get apocalyptic prophecies, secret societies working on
nefarious schemes, and wonderfully twisted personalities. “A two-headed lich beneath the Silver chapel is gathering an army of
undead rodents to destroy the sacred place above his lair”, or “Stones excavated from some ancient, cursed
tomb were used to build the mansion belonging to the Varnham family” – that’s
the stuff that made Krshal so wondrous and original. Sometimes, a single entry
becomes a cool little random table of its own – a recently opened sinkhole
might lead to “a maze of caverns filled
with living, sapient crystals”, or “a
tunnel to the Palatial Complex of Mar Gat’nep”, or (my favourite) “the graveyard of the train engines”. There
are a lot of fantastic ideas in the product, but they are messier and harder to
fish out of a collection of detours and dead ends than from the more neatly
structured Towers of Krshal.

Legends of Krshal continues the tradition of Towers with
imaginative and off the wall ideas, and it is definitely worth owning as a
supplement to the original. It should be used more carefully, and some of the really
good stuff is hidden in obscure corners you need to carefully and deliberately
look for and attack with a highlighter. It is less immediately useful as a game
material, but it is an invaluable idea mine – there's gold in them thar hills,
if you are willing to do the digging.